The “Good People” is a term of appeasement. In Irish folklore it is believed that the fairy folk walk among us, living in a parallel world humans cannot see – unless they are chosen to see it. “Fairy” has come to have a Disney sound; hear the word and it’s hard to banish an image of Tinkerbell from your mind. Banish that image. For the Other Folk (the Fair Folk, the Good Neighbours) are rarely benign; best to speak well of them, lest they become displeased. “The Good People watch us with a kind of knowing that can undo a man,” says Nance Roche in Hannah Kent’s second novel. Sometimes they will reward those who please them; but their punishment can come with little provocation. “Sometimes ’tis all unreason and no knowing why things are as they are, except to say ’tis the fairies behind it and they have their own intentions.”
The Good People is set in the south-west of Ireland in 1825 and 1826 – a place and a time not so far removed from the early 19th-century Iceland of her award-winning first novel, Burial Rites. Both are places of poverty and superstition, where characters are forced to look for explanations beyond the world they can see; both are places where the forces of modernity and change press hard upon tradition, and those who cling to the old ways can pay a heavy price. Both take their inspiration from actual events, and both are attempts to give voice to people who have often been voiceless.
The novel begins with hardship and sorrow – and much more will follow. Nóra Leahy’s grown daughter has died, leaving Nóra to care for her little boy, Micheál. As the book begins, poor Nóra’s husband dies too, struck down suddenly, a run of misfortune that leads some of her neighbours to believe that the supernatural is at work – not least because Nóra’s grandson, while apparently born a perfectly healthy child, is now mute and crippled, his ravening hunger never sated, his howling cries never silenced. Nance is the local healer, her presence in the community both required and reviled; the new priest, Father Healy, wishes to stamp out her heathen practice. But to Nóra, Nance’s charms offer the best hope of a cure for Micheál.
As with Burial Rites, there is no arguing with the diligence of Kent’s research, or indeed with her good intent. Unfortunately, however, her storytelling cannot sustain either her research or her intention. Characters are too weighed down by their circumstances to ever move beyond stereotypes. Nóra is a grieving woman battered by fate, but she has no room to be anything more than that. Nance Roche is a witchy woman living in a tumbledown cottage at the edge of the village, sustained by milk from her goat and her knowledge of plants and local lore – what else would we expect? Father Healy is stern, with a love of God that seems most unloving; again, as the reader might expect. There is a missed opportunity in Mary, the servant girl Nóra picks up at a hiring fair to help look after the house and care for little Micheál; red-headed Mary forms a greater bond with the little boy than Nóra ever has, but why this should be is never truly examined, and it leads to the result the reader will expect. This is a book of few surprises.
Which is a shame. Kent is a good descriptive writer: when Mary sees Micheál she observes him carefully, seeing that his skin “was tight and dry, and there was a thinness to it, like the pages of a priest’s holy book. He had nothing of the round-cheeked softness of the children Mary knew.” But it is as if Kent cannot decide whether to imaginatively enter the world of the Good People – or, conversely, tackle the larger social issues that give rise to the circumstances in which these characters live. The title of the novel, which asks the reader to question just who the good people in question might be, offers more than the writer can finally deliver.
Erica Wagner’s new book, Chief Engineer, will be published by Bloomsbury in June.
• The Good People by Hannah Kent is published by Picador (£14.99). To order a copy for £11.24 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
